Comments Off on Latest Graduation Data Reveal an Ongoing Crisis for California’s Highest Need Students

EdVocate West Blog
June 19, 2012

Written by: Arun Ramanathan

For the second year in a row, the California Department of Education (CDE) has released accurate and transparent graduation and dropout rate data thanks to the state’s use of CALPADS, the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System. The data once again reveal that California’s schools are graduating Latino, African-American, and low-income students at alarmingly low rates.

The data show that three out of four (76%) of our state’s students are graduating from high school in four years.

Sadly, the news is far worse for the state’s African-American, Latino, and low-income students, who graduate from high school at abysmally low rates—63% and 70%, respectively.

Education outcomes for students of color, students with disabilities, low-income students, and English learners, whose needs and potential are often overlooked, are particularly disturbing when compared with the graduation rates of their more advantaged peers. For example, California’s white students graduate at a rate of 86% and Asian students at a rate of 90%.

“Even though these rates are improving, at the rate California is going, it will take us 13 years to close the graduation gap between Latino and African-American students and their white peers,” said Arun Ramanathan, Executive Director of The Education Trust—West, a statewide education civil rights organization. “Every high school dropout is an individual tragedy. Tens of thousands of dropouts represent a large scale-tragedy for the California economy and our state’s future prosperity. It’s time we stopped talking about this problem and invested in the strategies that top districts and schools are using to fix it.”

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About American Graduate

American Graduate is a public media initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to help local communities across America find solutions to address the dropout crisis. The initiative builds on public media’s long-standing commitment to education by convening conversations and strengthening partnerships between public radio and television stations and local schools, businesses and community organizations to help students stay on the path to a high school diploma.